Also it stills remains one of the simplest databases to setup and use making it still my goto for hacks/spikes.
It's not hard to make it easy to do a thing in the wrong way - and that's exactly what MongoDB does. It doesn't make you set up authentication or table schemas, so it looks 'really easy to set up'.
In reality, though, you're wasting hours to save 10 minutes. Because at a later point, you're going to have your database broken into (if it can even be called that, without authentication), or you end up corrupting your data because two of your applications disagree over what the current object schema is.
To know how easy something really is, you need to compare how hard it is to set something up correctly. And once you do that, MongoDB falls far behind.
Of course, if you're at a company where those spikes find a way of turning into production code, then it's a different story.
Hacks that remain hacks in 100% of the cases, are rare :)
Why would I care about having my database broken into or even my data being corrupted for hacks/spikes. The very definition of these is that they are throwaway designed to test an idea before rebuilding in something more suitable.
And yes MongoDB is schemaless. That doesn't mean your data is going to automatically corrupt itself. You can just define your schema in some shared library. I can just as easily corrupt PostgreSQL if I change data types without updating the ORM.
No. There's no rule that says a prototype must be thrown away - often, it can be built upon further. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9913563
> And yes MongoDB is schemaless. That doesn't mean your data is going to automatically corrupt itself. You can just define your schema in some shared library.
This doesn't work if there is no shared library, for example if you have two separate components in different languages both using the database. And at that point you're (poorly) reinventing a schemaful database anyway.
> I can just as easily corrupt PostgreSQL if I change data types without updating the ORM.
A good ORM will abide by your database schema - and no, you can't "corrupt PostgreSQl" by "not updating your ORM". It will, at most, error out because you're trying to work with non-existent columns.
In a schemaless database, there's no such thing as "non-existent columns", thus you can quietly corrupt data without realizing it.
And yes you can corrupt PostgreSQL. Change the data types without updating your ORM.
Eh, more complex and less secure the sqlite which if you want can store json as string values and provide full text search.